I have been helping develop some client account tools for our main site www.GlassObelisk.com.au and I came across this really excellent set of Flash charting tools.

What is perhaps even more exciting for me, is that there is a Drupal module already released that will allow you to easily include Open Flash Charts in your site. It even supports the yet-to-be-released Drupal 6 (which our new site is using). Very good stuff.

Now the set of available charts and graphs is very impressive. There’s: Data Lines, Bar Charts, 3D Bar Charts, Glass Bar Charts, Fade Bar Charts, Sketch Bars, Area Charts, Bars + Lines, Pie Charts, Scatter Charts, Mixed Scatters, High Low Chars, Close Candle Charts and more. Now that’s a lot of charts.

Now what are we going to use it for? Well for showing account data in a nice visual manner. The number of SMS messages sent over the last month broken down into days, the number of hits on their websites - anything like that. There really is such a huge number of possibilities.

I hope you get as big a kick out of the Open Flash Charts as I do. Lots of kudos goes to John Glazebrook who came up with it all. Good work there.

If you have any suggestions for one of the myriad ways that we could use these graphs and charts, why not post it in the comments?

I don’t claim to be the font of knowledge for search engine optimisation but these tips might give people entirely new to the concept a bit of a push in the right direction.

My biggest personal issue with some SEO is that it throws visitor and user experience out the window. Yuck. If you can’t see the benefit for real people when you do something for your website, then I’d suggest steering well clear of doing whatever it is.

1. Where possible and practical, keywords in your domain/URL help:
   If you haven’t yet secured your domain name, then have a think about what your site will be about and make sure that’s obvious in the name. For example the content of bobs-place.com isn’t going to be as obvious to users as paintinghouses.com. Sure Bob might paint houses, and he might be good, but people are not going to be searching for ‘bob’ when looking for a painter unless they already know of his business.

2. Title tags > meta tags:
   Basically everything is more important than the old meta keyword tags, but they do have their use. The HTML title tag isn’t a meta tag, but it’s so often discussed in association with them, that it’s worth including here.  A good title which describes the specific page it’s about. A lot of websites might just go for the generic <title> My Site </title> across all the pages. Instead, try and go for something like “My Site: Book Reviews” for the book review page. It makes it a lot more obvious what that page is about, right? So do it. Obvious is good.

3. JavaScript is good fun, but not everyone can see it:
   Search engine spiders as a general rule will not be able to access components of your site that rely on JavaScript. Some users (yes, real people) also might opt not to enable JS. It’s courteous to make sure your site is still accessible and useable to these people. If you’re developing a site for a private audience this might not be such a problem, but when you want as many people to find and use it as possible, then make sure they can use it.

4. ?id=1908918
   Does that make sense to you? Do you know what the page refers to or is about? No, neither do I. Perhaps this should have come under point #1, but it’s such a huge problem for many websites at the moment, that I feel it deserves it’s own section. Dynamic websites are great, but at least make the URLs/URIs on the site slightly less intimidating. People are hardly going to write down the address to refer to later if it’s filled with code. Try using some .htaccess mod_rewrite handles to make it all pretty and nice, so you, search engines and visitors can all get along and play nicely. Check out this article for some great tips on setting it up.

5. Original content is good. Original content is good.
   I’m not just repeating myself for the sake of emphasis, it’s partly to introduce another no-no. While good, original content is king, duplicate content is not. This piece of advice is more to prevent search engine penalisation. Having verbatim copies of pages (whether your own sites or of other people’s) is not a good idea. It indicates that you don’t have anything original or useful to say, and you don’t want to portray that.

There are heaps of other things you can do to ensure your users enjoy their visit, and to curry favour with search engines. These ideas are purely a start, but if you follow them then you are doing at least something right.

I read a heap of blogs every week, part out of personal interest and partly to stay up to date with online developments. Around a week ago Erik Karey introduced a new advertising system that he’s developed, utilising eBay affiliate ads. phpBayAds does not yet seem to be up and running, but if you run a collection of your own sites or blogs, then this system might work well for you.

This post isn’t an endorsement - I haven’t had a chance to use it yet - but it does look good and might pay off for you.

The relationship between development time and the scope and size of a project is obvious. What may not be as readily apparent is the massive increase of work to even secure such a project. Over the last week I’ve been spending significant portions of my time creating, drafting and changing documents for it. Enough to give me a headache, but still, these things have to be done.

This is partly a post to assuage readers who may be (rightly) feeling a little neglected of late. I don’t really have the time to write something, but I am anyway. Yes, for you dear reader, I am forfeiting some of my sleep and more. You should feel special.

How do you deal with large projects?
That’s a very, very good question. The answer is to have a plan, a plan that tells you how to plan out the response for the project, the design and build of it, and then the support for it. A plan for a plan then, perhaps that sounds a bit redundant? It really isn’t. If you’re dealing with something that will involve a development team, you need a process set to help you map out every detail. You can’t just begin writing out all the features it will need, because that will end up being a mess with no structure or coherency and won’t allow you to gauge the size of the project at all.

My simple base plan is this:

1. Write out the goal, write out the current situation
2. Work out a development flow chart (e.g. proposal -> planning -> development/build -> review -> training -> launch -> support/maintenance)
3. Fill in the development flow chart in detail
4. Progress through the development plan

And with that, you should be in a position to better handle larger projects. Now I do need to get back to working on my particular one ;-).

Found this little gem on reddit today. UADDit have a collection of 19 really awesome and creative ads, some are inspiring from a marketing perspective but basically all of them are unique and… well, creative.

Well I do apologise for not updating the blog in the past few days. Our main site, www.glassobelisk.com.au is undergoing a major redesign. I’ll outline the details of the redesign briefly here:

1) Upgraded to Drupal 6 (RC2)

It’s beautiful. Go get it now. Enough said there.

2) Designed a fresh theme, compatible with Drupal 6

I like the theme. Very modular, easy to navigate etc, but also aesthetically very visually engaging.

3) Writing a massive amount of new content

Painful, but necessary. Content mightn’t be as enjoyable as the design work but a nice site is nothing without good content.

Full promotion and advertising of it will commence once it’s live (read: Google AdWords and AdBrite placements).

So again, sorry! But it’s for a good cause!